| Tomorrow, in an effort to protect access to in vitro fertilization for families across America against attacks by MAGA Republicans, Senate Democrats will bring the Right to IVF Act to the floor for a vote. In the two years since Donald Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade, MAGA Republicans have continued to push their extreme anti-choice agenda and are now threatening access to IVF, a medical procedure that has helped millions of Americans start and grow their families. Anti-choice MAGA Republicans are relentless in their crusade against women’s access to reproductive care – and Trump has made clear that he will double down on these attacks if he retakes power. But President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats up and down the ballot will continue to defend reproductive freedom, including IVF.
1. Seventy percent of Americans believe access to IVF is a good thing. Will you continue to push an out-of-touch agenda that ignores your constituents who want more reproductive freedoms, not less?
Trump is literally campaigning on it. And it’s a page straight out of Project 2025’s plan for a second Trump term.
Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, pg. 5: “Allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.”
And Trump’s MAGA minions in the House are hellbent on ripping away care, too.
The 19th News: “Seven of the 12 appropriations bills include provisions to restrict federal funding for gender-affirming care — which would cut gender transition care for people who receive Medicare, Medicaid or a subsidized plan under the Affordable Care Act.”
2. Do you believe every American should have the freedom to start and grow their family when and how they choose?
Trump’s Project 2025 cronies want to restrict access to IVF.
Politico: “Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization. Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.
“They plan to appeal to evangelical denominations and their leaders to take a firm stance that IVF as practiced in the U.S. destroys human life. That, they hope, will reshape how conservative Christians — and in turn, the officials they elect — view the issue, just as it did on abortion. Ultimately, it could lead to laws that create a patchwork of IVF access in the United States, where the procedure is more accessible in liberal states and more limited in conservative ones.”
3. Would you let Donald Trump and his anti-IVF cronies set the extreme MAGA agenda?
TIME: “Roger Severino, a prominent attorney for the Christian right, led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights during the Trump administration. In 2017, The Atlantic called him ‘the man behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for health care.’”
“Severino calls for HHS to prohibit women’s health facilities that receive Title X funding from distributing condoms. And by declaring that life begins at conception, his manifesto appears to commit HHS to finding ways to outlaw IVF, which relies on generating multiple embryos, most of which are not implanted. It could also eliminate birth control methods like the IUD and even some forms of the pill.”
HuffPost: “Donald Trump Has Deep Ties To Anti-IVF Movement”
“While in the White House, Trump and his administration praised, appointed and worked with some of the nation’s most extreme thought leaders who believe the IVF process is akin to murder. Trump hosted the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the IVF ruling twice: once during his 2016 campaign and in 2018 at the White House. (This is the same chief justice who recently appeared on a QAnon conspiracist’s show.)”
4. Donald Trump never stops bragging about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade — which has paved the way for devastating abortion bans and attacks on everything from medication abortion to IVF across the country. How much longer will you enable these attacks?
CNN: “How the reversal of Roe v. Wade led to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are children”
New York Times: “[The Alabama ruling was] made possible by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in its 2022 Dobbs decision, which was a result of Mr. Trump’s appointment of three justices.”
Politico: “Louisiana is set to make possessing abortion pills without a prescription punishable by up to 10 years in prison
Rolling Stone: “Inside the MAGA Plan to Attack Birth Control, Surveil Women and Ban the Abortion Pill”
“The attacks on mifepristone and resurrection of Comstock stand out as particularly harmful proposals, but they are only two of the dozens of ways the Republicans behind Project 2025 envision restricting access to abortion and contraception if they win the White House next year. Elsewhere in the document, there are proposals to eliminate the morning-after pill from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate under the rationale that it is a ‘potential abortifacient.’”
5. Do you support extreme anti-abortion legislation that could rip away IVF access from Americans who want to start a family nationwide?
Politico: “At the same time that they are professing support for IVF, dozens of congressional Republicans have signed onto so-called personhood legislation with no carve-out for embryos in clinics, which, if enacted, would upend how the procedure is practiced in the United States.”
Matthew Yglesias, Bloomberg: “In case anyone is still covering the IVF question, today’s new Republican Study Committee budget specifically endorses the idea that embryos have the full legal rights of persons under the 14th Amendment.”
Associated Press: “Republicans block Senate bill to protect nationwide access to IVF treatments”
Business Insider: “Most House Republicans have cosponsored a bill declaring that life begins from the moment of conception, a position under increased scrutiny after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are ‘unborn children.’
“This Congress, 125 House Republicans — including Speaker Mike Johnson — have cosponsored the ‘Life at Conception Act,’ which states that the term ‘human being’ includes ‘all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.’
“The bill does not include any exception for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a reproductive treatment that allows mothers to fertilize several eggs outside the womb in order to increase the chances of a viable pregnancy.”
NBC News: “But with the landmark Roe ruling protecting those rights gone, efforts by conservative lawmakers and judges to advance fetal personhood bills pose a real threat to some fertility treatments, including IVF, reproductive rights advocates say.”
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